Boneshaker

by Cherie Priest

Publisher:

Tor

Copyright:

2009

ISBN:

0-7653-1841-5

Format:

Trade paperback

Pages:

416

In an alternate 1860 in which the Klondike gold rush began fifty years
earlier than it did in our reality, the Russians ran a contest, looking
for a machine capable of drilling through ice to get at a newly discovered
rich vein of gold. They were on the verge of giving up three years later
when a man named Leviticus Blue invented the Boneshaker, or rather
Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine. The reasons for
subsequent events are unclear, but all agree that Blue drove the finished
Boneshaker underneath the central downtown of a much more populous Seattle
than in our universe, destroying the financial district and opening the
vaults of nearly every bank. In the subsequent turmoil, something far
worse came in its wake: a noxious gas rising from the tunnel, spreading
out over the city, killing those who breathed it, and then raising them
again as zombies (or, as this book calls them, rotters). Downtown was
evacuated in a panic as makeshift walls were put in place to try to keep
the gas from spreading.

It's now sixteen years later, and the downtown core is surrounded by a
hundred-foot wall and abandoned to the gas and the rotters. The remaining
denizens huddle near the walls in a grey world scarred by the acidity of
what blight gas blows out of the city, while the US Civil War drags on and
on in the east. Briar Wilkes, Blue's former wife, works long hours in the
water purification plant that removes the blight from the city's water,
despite constant harassment by her coworkers, to support a marginal
existence for herself and her son Zeke. She never talks about what
happened, leaving Zeke to develop his own theories and ideas. Those ideas
eventually harden into a determination to prove his father innocent and
reclaim his family name, sending him through drainage tunnels under the
wall into the old city. Briar follows by airship after an earthquake, and
so begins a pulp adventure story in the rotter-infested, blight-filled,
crumbling streets of an alternate Seattle.

Zombies have been the rage in dark fantasy for the past ten years or so,
turning up everywhere from the multiplex to retellings of classic novels.
Steampunk — elaborate 19th century technology of brass and
gears — has been a growing subgenre since around 1990. I
don't believe Priest was the first one to cross the streams, but she does
so with gusto and may be the most memorable. Everything an afficiando of
either genre could hope for is here: desperate running gun battles with
the mindless slavering horde, grotesque turnings of humans to zombies,
airships and airship battles, ingenious inventions, lavish Victorian
hideouts, clockwork hands, aviator goggles, and the book's most enduring
symbol: the ever-present gas mask that the characters struggle with, hate,
and need to survive the blight gas.

Zeke and Briar enter the city in entirely different places and through
different methods, and most of the book is devoted to Zeke's search for a
way to his father's old home and Briar's search for Zeke. They both meet
different cross-sections of the desperate and determined people who remain
in the city (in part because addictive drugs can be distilled from blight
gas), letting the reader piece together some of the political structure
and alliances of the city before either of the characters. The rotters
are thankfully more threatened than seen; they're there for the climax, of
course, but otherwise Priest is sparing about showing them directly. The
constant struggle for survival is more against the gas than the zombies,
which makes for a more psychological (and, frankly, less silly) sort of
suspense than constant zombie battles would have.

Boneshaker has no qualms about being sheer pulp adventure, down to
a monomaniacal villain, an evilly effective lieutenant, and a variety of
helpful allies or useful cannon fodder. But what surprised me is the
depth of the characterization. As well as being pulp adventure, it's also
a story about the relationship between a single mother and her son, about
poverty and the cruelty of communities, and about loyalty and love in a
way that doesn't involve long speeches or lots of words. Both Briar and
Zeke have messed up their relationship, but both of them are trying hard,
and the book is refreshingly without either angstful emotional collapses
or tearful revelatory morals. Everything isn't suddenly all better, but
even if they struggle to talk to each other, the bond between them is
stronger than anything in the book. The conclusion was far less maudlin
than it could have been, and far more satisfying and true to the
characters.

It's that characterization and relationship that for me elevated this book
above a straight retro-pulp adventure and left it feeling like far more
than a confluence of two commercial trends in the SF world. Neither
zombie apocalypse nor steampunk are genres that hold much interest for me,
but I liked Briar, wanted to root for her, and was drawn through
the story by her determination. Life doesn't come easy to her, but she
makes the best of bad situations and does what she can, in a way that made
her one of the more admirable protagonists I've read about in some time.
That's a lot more depth than one usually gets in a pulp heroine.

If you like steampunk or zombie fiction, and particularly if you like
both, this is a great book. If you don't, and even if you can't stand
horror at all, you may still want to give it a try. The horror aspect is
more claustrophobic than terrifying; at least for me, it's not the sort of
book that could give one nightmares. And despite the pulp background and
larger-than-life supporting cast, the characterization of the protagonists
is spot-on and a joy to read. I liked it rather more than I thought I was
going to.